A dialectical analysis of conventional wisdom on Russia, China, and the Sino-Russian partnership
Three of the questions that dominate the security policy debate in Europe today include: Is Russia really that strong? Is China really that aggressive? Is the cooperation between Russia and China really that solid? The conventional answers to all three tend overwhelmingly toward the affirmative. But the history of strategic assessment is littered with costly errors. Is it time for the devil’s advocate to challenge assumptions? What can history teach us?
The Thesis: Today’s Conventional Wisdom
One fairily common set of Western assessments rests on three pillars.
First, Russia is treated as a formidable military power whose armed forces, despite heavy losses in Ukraine, retain the capacity to regenerate, escalate, and threaten NATO’s eastern flank. Moscow has placed its economy on a war footing, sustaining high levels of military production and recruiting hundreds of thousands of additional troops. Russia’s nuclear arsenal remains the world’s largest, and the Kremlin’s willingness to invoke nuclear threats has become a recurring feature of its strategic signalling.
Second, the “no limits” partnership between Russia and China, proclaimed in February 2022, is widely seen as a de facto alliance. The two countries conduct joint military exercises, coordinate diplomatic positions at the United Nations, and share an overarching goal of undermining the U.S.-led international order. China’s economic support has been critical in sustaining Russia’s war economy, with bilateral trade reaching record levels and Chinese technology finding its way into Russian weapons systems.
Third, China is perceived as an increasingly aggressive power — asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea, intensifying pressure on Taiwan, expanding its military at breakneck speed, and projecting influence across the Global South through the Belt and Road Initiative. In combination with Russia, China is seen as part of an authoritarian axis determined to reshape the international order by force if necessary.
This is the picture that drives Western defence planning. NATO is re-arming. European defence budgets are climbing. And the assumption of a durable, dangerous Sino-Russian front underpins much of the strategic calculus. But is this picture complete?
The Antithesis: Lessons from the Cold War
History offers important lessons learned.
Earlier overestimation of Soviet military strength. Throughout the Cold War, NATO planning was built on the premise that Soviet conventional forces were overwhelming. The Red Army’s vast manpower, its low personnel costs, and the sheer number of its tanks and divisions were taken as evidence that NATO could not defend Western Europe without early resort to nuclear weapons. This assumption drove the extensive deployment of tactical nuclear weapons across Europe and shaped decades of alliance strategy. Yet when the Cold War ended and the CFE Treaty’s intrusive on-site inspections began, a far less impressive reality emerged. Equipment was poorly maintained. Entire engine blocks had been stripped from tanks in storage. Quality control was negligible. Corruption was endemic. There had been, as George Kennan later reflected, “highly inflated estimates of Russian conventional military strength” that had become ingrained in Western thinking. The systematic overestimation of Soviet capabilities had been matched by an underestimation of Moscow’s willingness to resort to nuclear weapons if it faced existential danger — a dangerous analytical error that distorted deterrence calculations on both sides.
Today, Russia’s war in Ukraine has once again exposed the gap between perceived and actual military capability. Misconceived operational plans, poor logistics, failed command and control, and the decrepit condition of much of Russia’s hardware have revealed deep systemic weaknesses. The operations in Georgia, Crimea, and Syria that had previously impressed Western observers “were conducted against feeble adversaries and said zero about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute, well-armed enemy”. As during the Cold War, the image of Russian strength may once more be considerably larger than the reality. So is President Zelensky right: Ukraine is not losing the war?
The myth of Sino-Soviet solidarity. The second lesson concerns the supposed monolithic unity of the communist bloc. For much of the Cold War, Western planners treated the Sino-Soviet alliance as a given — a unified communist front that doubled the threat to the West. This assumption proved spectacularly wrong. From 1956 onwards, the Sino-Soviet split deepened, driven by ideological rivalry, territorial disputes, and clashing great-power ambitions. By 1969, it had escalated into open military conflict along the Ussuri River, with Chinese and Soviet troops killing dozens on each side in fierce border clashes near Zhenbao Island. Both sides subsequently deployed over a million troops along their shared border, and China conducted two nuclear weapons tests in September 1969 to underscore its deterrent capacity.
The split extended to their respective approaches to supporting revolutionary movements. In Vietnam, the divergence was particularly revealing. China was willing to support the liberation struggle in the South far more aggressively than Moscow, which focused primarily on defensive weapons and economic aid to Hanoi. The two communist patrons competed for influence in Hanoi, with Beijing wielding significantly more leverage through its proximity and the scale of its aid. Far from a united front, the Sino-Soviet relationship was riven by deep strategic mistrust.
The Kissinger opening. The third Cold War lesson concerns the malleability of perceived adversaries. China was treated as an implacable enemy until Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to Beijing in 1971 and President Nixon’s historic trip in February 1972 fundamentally altered the strategic landscape. Nixon exploited the Sino-Soviet split to create a triangular balance of power, driving an ideological wedge between Moscow and Beijing and extracting significant Soviet concessions. The perception of China shifted dramatically — from an aggressive revolutionary power to a pragmatic geopolitical partner. The visit “changed the world,” as Nixon himself declared, not because China had changed overnight, but because assumptions about Chinese intentions had been wrong.
The Synthesis: What Should We Assume Today?
If history teaches us to question conventional wisdom, what do we conclude when applying these Cold War lessons to the present?
On Russian strength, the synthesis is nuanced but sobering for hawks and doves alike. Russia may be weaker than it appears — but weakness does not equal harmlessness. A dangerous mix persists: Russia’s conventional military performance has been poor, but its nuclear, cyber, and disinformation capabilities remain potent. Chatham House has documented how international sanctions and the demands of war have exposed and intensified existing shortcomings in Russia’s military-industrial base, with Moscow struggling to build genuinely new systems and relying instead on Soviet-era legacy platforms. At the same time, growing war fatigue within Russia is unmistakable. Independent polling indicates that two-thirds of Russians now support peace talks, the highest level since the war began. A majority expect the war to end in 2026, and rising levels of fatigue, fear, and anger are evident in survey data. The daily reality is wearing Russians down, even if it has not yet produced a fundamental shift in worldview. Recent reports from the streets of St Petersburg indicate a depressed and pessimistic image of commuters moving from one job to another in order to compensate for inflation.
On the Sino-Russian partnership, the devil’s advocate finds more fragility than solidarity. CSIS has identified three key structural weaknesses: historical mistrust rooted in centuries of Russian exploitation of a weaker China; a growing power asymmetry as Russia stagnates and China rises; and the blowback that Russia’s military aggression creates for Chinese interests. An FSB leak described by security analysts labelled China a “dangerous adversary,” accusing Beijing of recruiting Russian engineers, analysing NATO weaponry captured in Ukraine, and pursuing territorial claims in Russia’s Far East. As one assessment concluded: “Russia and China cooperate because they have to, not because they trust each other”. Meanwhile, China’s quiet push to build a modern container port in Slavyansk Bay in Russia’s Far East and the linguistic shift of referring to Vladivostok by its pre-Russian name, Haishenwai, speak volumes about Moscow’s growing dependency and Beijing’s patient assertion of leverage. SCEEUS research from Stockholm concludes that an ever weaker and more dependent Russia alongside a relatively strong China is creating an asymmetry that will inevitably produce friction.
On Chinese aggressiveness, the picture is equally complex. China launched its first liner-type Arctic container shipping service to Western Europe in 2025, connecting Ningbo to Felixstowe, Rotterdam, Hamburg, and Gdańsk in just 18 days via the Northern Sea Route — less than half the transit time through Suez. The operator plans to establish regular summer voyages by 2026, and China’s Ministry of Transport has begun live sea ice monitoring. This “Ice Silk Road” represents an enormous commercial investment premised on stable access to European markets. Can China credibly pursue this while supporting a war that destabilises the European continent? The logic of trade expansion through the Arctic sits in fundamental tension with the logic of backing Russian aggression. Beijing’s reluctance to provide Russia with weapons for its war effort and the sharp decline in Russian arms exports to China suggest that this tension is already biting.
The devil’s advocate does not counsel complacency. Russia remains a nuclear-armed state with demonstrated willingness to use force. China is expanding its military and asserting its interests with growing confidence. Their partnership, while constrained, is real. But the devil’s advocate insists on analytical honesty: we have overestimated adversaries before, mistaken marriages of convenience for durable alliances, and failed to detect cracks that were visible to those willing to look. The Cold War ended not with the bang that decades of worst-case planning had anticipated, but with the quiet implosion of a system whose weaknesses had been systematically underestimated.
The policy implication is not to lower our guard but to sharpen our analysis. European security requires robust deterrence — but it also requires the intellectual courage to question whether the threat picture we are acting upon corresponds to reality, or to a consensus that has ceased to be examined. Overestimating Russian/Chinese strength and cohesion may lead defaitism.
Lars-Erik Lundin
(Original draft enhanced and validated contrasting different AI-models)